How to learn things automatically

Imagine watching a computer screen while lying down in a brain imaging machine and automatically learning how to play the guitar or lay up hoops like Shaq O’Neal, or even how to recuperate from a disease — without any conscious knowledge.

Researchers at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan used decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce visual cortex activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.

Neuroscientists have previously found that pictures gradually build up inside a person’s brain, appearing first as lines, edges, shapes, colors and motion in early visual areas. The brain then fills in greater detail to make a red ball appear as a red ball, for example. Researchers studied the early visual areas for their ability to cause improvements in visual performance and learning.

“However, none of these studies directly addressed the question of whether early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning,” said Watanabe. So they used decoded fMRI neurofeedback to induce a particular activation pattern in targeted early visual areas that corresponded to a pattern evoked by a specific visual feature in a brain region of interest. The researchers found that repetitions of the activation pattern caused long-lasting visual performance improvement on that visual feature — without the subject’s active involvement. The method could be used for improving memory or motor (muscle) skills, the researchers suggest.

But that’s where is gets a bit scary. “In theory, hypnosis or a type of automated learning is a potential outcome,” said Kawato. “However, in this study we confirmed the validity of our method only in visual perceptual learning. So we have to test if the method works in other types of learning in the future. At the same time, we have to be careful so that this method is not used in an unethical way.”

Academics at Glasgow University and elsewhere have developed 3D virtual worlds to act as informal communities that allow students to learn by interacting in shared learning activities, such as film making and photography.

“We demonstrated that you can plan activities with kids and get them working in 3D worlds with commitment, energy and emotional involvement, over a significant period of time,” project lead researcher Professor Victor Lally said.

OK, but those are things sound like fun to do. Why do they need avatars and elaborate virtual worlds — just give me a video cam and some software and get the hell out of my way! These kids are sitting there in from of monitors vegging out watching virtual worlds instead of shooting Occupy Edinburgh for YouTube.

My guess is that this is really intended as a tool to teach stuff that students have no interest in. In other words: more effective compulsory government-controlled education.

“It’s a highly engaging medium that could have a major impact in extending education and training beyond geographical locations. 3-D worlds seem to do this in a much more powerful way than many other social tools currently available on the Internet,” Lally insisted. “When appropriately configured, this virtual environment can offer safe spaces to experience new learning opportunities that seemed unfeasible only 15 years ago.”

“You can now create multiple science simulations of field trip locations, for example, using 3-D world ‘hyper-grids’ that allow participants to ‘teleport’ between a range of experiments or activities. This enables the students to share their learning through recording their activities, presenting graphs about their results, and use voting technologies to judge attitudes and opinions from others. It can offer new possibilities for designing exciting and engaging learning spaces. This kind of 3D technology could be used to simulate training environments, retail contexts, and interview situations.”

OK, maybe I was wrong. For some subjects (think: math, science), hanging out in (and building) virtual worlds is a hell of a lot more fun than sitting around listening to some boring teacher drone on and on. What do you think?

Comments (6)

Remember not remembering things from time time throughout your entire life up until just a few years ago? To not remember is to not know. “Know” is the root word of “knowledge”. Not knowing things was a problem humanity had to deal since the beginning of time. This problem is now officially solved. Knowledge is now ubiquitous.

Have you ever suffered from a case of forgetting a name? It’s on the tip-of-your-tongue. You can see the actor’s face. You can name two movie’s he’s been in (Beverly Hills Cop and True Romance), and a television show (eh, also cannot recall the name of that television show…).

For the life of you, you can not remember that funny guy’s – with brown hair – name. You think it starts with a “B”. And you know he starred in that Laverne & Shirley’ish take-off… what was the name of that show?.. Perfect Strangers! Yes! …but what the hell is his name…

Up until just less than 10 years ago and throughout all prior history, you’d be plain stuck with that actor’s name on the-tip-of-your-tongue (unless you were at a library, or happened to be with somebody else who might be able to help you remember).

But now, with the combination of your search engine and your mobile device; the problem of not remembering (or knowing) facts is cured. We are forever cured of not knowing something (With the exception of information which is not published. But there is A LOT of information published already As of this writing,Wikipedia alone, for example, has over 4 million articles in English).

Our “memory” is new and improved with the aid of mobile devices, search engines and ubiquitous internet access. Does this recent memory upgrade of ours improve our intelligence? And if so; are we becoming artificially intelligent? Given that the exact definition of “intelligence” is still under debate, this question is unanswerable. But I will go so far as to say that we now have two new things; I will call them 1) artificial memory and 2) artificial knowledge.

All’s we need is a Smart Phone and we have access to all of humanity’s published database of knowledge. Ray Kurzweil (Director of Engineering, Google) calls this “artificial telepathy”; meaning, no matter where you are you can share a thought (on a social network for example) or “know” something with the aid of your search engine.

From the frustrating occurrence of forgetting Bronson Pinchot’s name to, say, a life-threatening occurrence of not remembering how to tell a King Snake apart from a Coral Snake (because both have the exact same colors and types of stripes); hard to remember facts have conveniently moved from the tip-of-our-tongues (hard to recall) to our finger-tips (Total Recall).

Effectively; all of us now “know” everything that can be found on the internet – if we can define “knowing” as having access to information. With mobile search technology; you no longer need to “remember” (or “know”) any facts or details by yourself. Instead of having to “remember” it, you can now just “search” it on your “external memory” (i.e. Google) as quickly as it would take you to recall Bronson Pinchot’s name from your own “internal memory” (your brain).

In the event that you find a yellow, black and red ring-striped snake in your camping tent upon returning from a hike; just key your best hint into Google (i.e. Coral vs. King Snake), sort through a couple of resulting links, and now you know for sure that one rhyme you can never remember for sure all by yourself – “red on yellow will kill a fellow, but red on black is a friend of jack”.

Sure thing, this snake’s red and yellow ring-stripes are next to each other. The snake you encountered is a Coral Snake – the venomous one of the famous twin-like pair of snakes. Also, your Google search result contains multiple links teaching you two critical things 1) Coral Snakes contain massively strong Neurotoxins strong enough to kill 5 adults and 2) earlier this year Coral Snake Antivenin was discontinued in the U.S. due to lack of profit! These are two gravely important facts to “know”, given your situation.

You are a risk-taker by nature, and were tempted to remove the cute small snake by yourself. Now you know for 100% sure that you better call the park ranger and are not advised to handle this particular snake removal yourself. Calling the park ranger was the right decision. You made an informed, intelligent decision; not a guess. In light of your risk-taker nature (some call you a dare-devil); this information could very well have saved your life.

Sure, you’ve seen maybe a dozen documentaries featuring Coral Snakes on NatGeo, Animal Planet and The Discovery Channel throughout your life. But all the details and that annoyingly hard to remember “red on yellow kill a fellow” rhyme sit stuck on the tip of your tongue, until the moment you convince yourself that you cannot “remember” the rhyme yourself you “search” it.

“Searching” knowledge is replacing (or at this point just complimenting) “Remembering” or “Knowing” knowledge. “Hard to Recall” is a solved problem. We now have “Total Recall”. Information which is hard to recall in your own mind (or which does not even exist at all inside your mind because you never learned it in the first place) is now available in Total Recall fashion.

So, what have we learned so far in this millenium? I guess, EVERYTHING! at least everything that is known and published by woman/man.

And even though I could learn the concept of Quantum Mechanics, right now, if I searched for it… I’m not going to search it. I’m just going to sit here relishing two new conveniences of our fresh, young, new millenium. One, I will never suffer from tip-of-the-tongue syndrome again. And two, I will never have to stop for directions again.

As a professional trainer in Earth Sciences I would use this kind of approach all the time. Yes you could go and take pictures of the cliffs in North East England, but I need the students to see Book Cliffs in Utah, so use a virtual environment. At the moment I encourage students to use Google Maps to tour parts of the world they would never ever get to.

The key thing with kids is they don’t know what they don’t know, and they need their eyes opened up to the possibilities, and their curiosity tweaked. A virtual world is a great way to bombard them with possibilities.

This kind of approach works well with the Flipped Classroom as well. The kids can get the “teaching” from the virtual reality game, then spend the time solving problems and doing practical stuff during the limited Face-to-Face time with the teacher.

I too am an ES Educator. I have been advancing the awareness for immersive use of 21st Century integration from Second Life into the connected classroom for years now.. Many colleagues / Peers are threatened by my zest.. Kids get it though!

Honestly, maybe I am getting old, but this part of an otherwise interesting article just hit me the wrong way: “My guess is that this is really intended as a tool to teach stuff that students have no interest in. In other words: more effective compulsory government-controlled education.”

Duh, do you really think so? It is one thing to try new ways of making important things worth learning “more interesting” or “relevant.” It is quite another to posit that children know what is worth learning and what isn’t and that somehow their “interest” is important in formulating curricula. Parents don’t ask kids if they are interested in learning to walk or babysit or do chores; they tell them to do these things and to do them properly (i.e., learn how). Professors don’t ask students what is important to know or learn; they challenge those students’ preconceptions (which are often parochial). Employers simply pay for services from people who know something or can do something they need.

It is a vastly greater ego trip to imagine the government has some interest in you and your “compulsory” government education. It certainly does have an interest in public education. In America, that is to produce good adult citizens who are well-informed and relatively law-abiding and self-productive. The cost of the free public education some students just simply “waste” is enormous.. to us and to them. The curriculum is only very modestly “controlled” and that is a constant political issue among adult citizens (not their children). But most educators are very good people who try as hard as they can to teach their skills and disciplines .. and morals too. This is NOT a conspiracy or some major government propaganda machine.

” In America, that is to produce good adult citizens who are well-informed and relatively law-abiding and self-productive.”

If those are the government’s intentions, it’s certainly not doing a very good job at it. You seem to be very biased toward government mandated education (yes, it is “compulsory”, as in you will go to jail if you don’t send your kids to school). I agree that it’s highly unlikely to be a conspiracy, apparently that’s the author’s writing style, but the government isn’t as perfect as you think it is.

This is a facinating topic… thanks for the post. I have been thinking about it since The Lawnmower Man, though interestingly, when I decided to start studying Neuroscience to help me design better GUIs back in my engineering days, the topic never served to direct my later reading in the research.

Thinking about it now I started to consider the evolutionary purpose of dreaming. Like the motor skill acquisition driven neuronal pruning after birth, and the analogous event in the prefrontal cortext at the onset of puberty, I wonder if dreams are the manifestation of a similar process on a smaller scale with only changes in plasticity rather than larger collateral rearrangement. Also, during dream sleep, if I remember correctly, the motor efferents are inhibited.

It just seems like, when considering these things along with the function of the mirror neuron system, that learning from visual memory, real or induced is feasible.

It may have increadible potential, but also, as you noted, it could be very dangerous. Something, perhpas, we should keep an eye on… ;)